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Amazing Blondel are an English acoustic progressive folk band, containing Eddie Baird, John Gladwin, and Terry Wincott. They released a number of LPs for Island Records in the early 1970s. They are sometimes categorised as psychedelic folk or as medieval folk rock, but their music was much more a reinvention of Renaissance music, based around the use of period instruments such as lutes and recorders.

In the early 1970s, two fellow Royal College of Music graduates, multi-instrumentalist Richard Harvey and the woodwind player Brian Gulland began the group as an all-acoustic ensemble, mixing traditional English folk music with medieval and Renaissance influences. Shortly after this, the duo was joined by guitarist Graeme Taylor and drummer/percussionist Dave Oberlé.

1973-1977: band career and breakup

After their self-titled debut, they expanded their sound to include electric guitars and keyboards as well as wind instruments, such as bassoon and krumhorns, not previously used in rock music. Gryphon's music often sounded as much like rural English folk or renaissance chansons as it did rock, at least on their early recordings.

In 1974, the group's publicist Martin Lewis arranged for the band to be commissioned to write and record the music for a major stage production of Shakespeare's The Tempest at Britain's National Theatre, directed by Sir Peter Hall. It opened at the historic Old Vic Theatre in April 1974. The music the band wrote and recorded for the stage production inspired the 21-minute fantasia "Midnight Mushrumps" (named after a phrase mentioned in The Tempest) which became the title track of their second album. Following the successful premiere of the play and acclaim for its music, Lewis arranged for Gryphon to give a Sunday evening concert at the Old Vic in July 1974 - the first-ever and to date only rock concert held at Britain's National Theatre. At the concert, the band performed "Midnight Mushrumps". The concert was considered a major breakthrough for progressive rock music.

After their third album Red Queen to Gryphon Three and the subsequent tour as a supporting act for Yes, their instrumentation became more conventional and the use of non-standard instruments was reduced.

Graeme Taylor left the band in 1975, along with bass player Malcolm Bennett, after the US and UK tours supporting Yes ('74/'75) and the completion of the fourth album, Raindance. Bennett, previously a Royal College of Music student, had replaced Philip Nestor in 1974.

Gryphon split up in 1977 after the release of their fifth and final album Treason (Harvest Records).

2007-present

In September 2007, Gryphon announced on their website that they had finally decided to produce a new album after a silence of thirty-one years. They also suggested the possibility of a one-off live performance in London, which finally occurred on 6 June 2009 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, thirty-two years after their last performance. The four original members - Richard Harvey, Brian Gulland, Graeme Taylor and Dave Oberlé - opened the evening with a selection of songs and instrumentals from the first album Gryphon. They were then joined by Jon Davie (the final bass player, who appeared on Treason) and a new member, the multi-instrumentalist and film/production music composer Graham Preskett for the rest of the evening.

A follow-up tour was postponed, but the band eventually played six dates in Spring 2015, with further dates in 2016 including Fairport Convention's Cropredy Convention The New day Festival and a return to Union Chapel.

In the spring of 2016, it was announced that Richard Harvey was leaving the band due to a cramped schedule. Shortly after, Gryphon gained two new members: Andy Findon on woodwinds and Rory McFarlane on bass.A new Gryphon album is due for release in 2018.

Tír na nÓg are an Irish folk band formed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1969 by Leo O'Kelly and Sonny Condell. They are often considered as one of the first progressive folk bands with other artists like Nick Drake or groups like Pentangle. Their music mainly consists of their own compositions, based on strong Celtic roots and typically featuring intricate acoustic guitar playing and close harmony singing. In their early years, they toured the folk clubs of the United Kingdom or internationally as a support act for several rock bands. Today, they regularly give concerts, especially in Ireland.From 1971 to 1973, Tír na nÓg made three studio albums which were highly acclaimed by critics but didn't receive a big commercial success. No recording of live performances had been officially released until 2000, with the publication of Hibernian. A compilation of some of their live tracks recorded between 1972 and 1973 for the John Peel's radio show, was also published one year later.

Few survivors from the golden age of British folk-rock have kept their reputations intact. Of the generation of troubadours who came of age in the folk clubs of London in the mid-1960s, some have passed away, others have surrendered to the regurgitation of the blandest form of acoustic folk music. But among the survivors, there is one figure whose body of work, comprising 23 studio LPs and almost as many live and compilation releases, has come to stand for a particularly single-minded form of integrity. That man is Roy Harper.

Now officially ‘retired’, and living in a secluded corner of Ireland, Harper has recently been hailed as a key influence by a much younger generation of devoted starsailors who instinctively recognise his innovations, his refusal to compromise and his visionary world view. It is rumoured that Joanna Newsom insisted she’d only play her recent UK shows if he would support her. The likes of Fleet Foxes and Jim O’Rourke are avowed fans; and in previous decades he has enjoyed public endorsements and tributes from the likes of Led Zeppelin, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour and many more.

Born in 1941, Harper lost his mother within a few weeks of his birth and was brought up in the outskirts of Manchester by his father and stepmother, a Jehovah's Witness. Harper developed a deep hatred of organised religion and ran away, aged 15, to join the Royal Air Force. The rigid discipline required did not suit him. In order to be discharged early he pleaded insanity and was committed to an institution where he received ECT. A former participant in the skiffle revolution in the mid-50s, around 1964 Harper found himself joining the stream of bohemian rambler-buskers hitching and singing their way around Europe and North Africa. On his return to Britain he pitched in to the London coffee-house folk scene and secured a residence at legendary folk club Les Cousins, where he was spotted by the obscure Strike label.

Beginning with 1966’s Sophisticated Beggar, Harper’s music has consistently rattled the cage of received ideas. His versatile, poetic sensibility was employed in a wide range of song styles from romantic love songs to late-night mantras to blackly comedic throwaway numbers. A brilliant, percussive guitar stylist in his own right, he extended the form of folk music over the next few years, allowing himself the space to stretch out in long, lyrically dense and mantrically repetitive odysseys of poetic thought. “I was writing long poems in the 50s,” says Harper, “none of which unfortunately made it past the first few moves of living quarters. My first inspiration was John Keats’s Endymion.”

The first inklings of his expansive approach on record came on the ten minute “Circle” on 1967’s Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith – produced by Shel Talmy – and was vastly ramped up on the following year’s Folkjokeopus, which contained an 18 minute “McGoohan’s Blues”, named after the lead actor of TV’s The Prisoner and whose enigmatic verses were laced with anti-establishment rants.

By this time Harper was a favourite at the outdoor Hyde Park Festivals, where he was exposed to the wider attention of the underground scene. Now produced and managed by Peter Jenner, and signed to EMI’s progressive label Harvest, his 1969 LP Flat Baroque And Berserk reflected his reputation as a bloodyminded, truculent troubadour, reflecting turbulent times with anger, wrath and sardonic humour, singing – like the mistle thrush after which his next opus would be named – into the eye of the storm.

Stormcock (1971) is generally regarded as a masterpiece: a sprawling but focused suite of four lengthy tracks which explored the inner space of Abbey Road Studio to rhapsodic effect. Like Astral Weeks refracted through the pages of OZ magazine, the songs span an enormous spectrum of experience, from the frontline of social unrest to the secluded, birdsong-infested lanes of the English countryside. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page added guitar, disguised as ‘S Flavius Mercurius’, highlighting a relationship with the group that had begun at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. “Hats Off To (Roy) Harper”, an incoherent, gutsy blues workout on Led Zeppelin III, paid tribute to the singer’s status as a beacon of integrity for the underground scene.

Harper enjoyed a special relationship with Led Zeppelin, and his subsequent albums began to move into harder rock territory with the addition of various key collaborators including, as well as Page, orchestral arranger/keyboardist David Bedford, David Gilmour, Chris Spedding, Bill Bruford and John Paul Jones. Lifemask (1972) contained several songs written for the film Made, directed by John Mackenzie, which starred Harper as an edgy, high-maintenance rock star. Valentine (1974) was launched with a gig featuring Page and Bedford plus Ronnie Lane and Keith Moon. He was invited to sing lead on the single “Have A Cigar” from Pink Floyd’s classic album Wish You Were Here (1975). In the same year Harper released HQ, a rock based album notable for the closing track, “When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease”, an elegiac hymn to unchanging ways and mortality which BBC DJ John Peel insisted should be played in the event of his death.

With the dawn of the 1980s Harper took part in a musical exchange with Kate Bush, who guested on The Unknown Soldier (1980), while Harper returned the favour by appearing on Bush’s hit single “Breathing”. Harper rode the unsteady waves of the music industry during the early 1980s but kept up a productive output that saw his music taking on a prophetic role, expressing more explicit concerns with environmental disaster, religious fundamentalism, urban poverty and the first Gulf War, on releases like Once (1990) and The Dream Society (1998), through to his most recent studio album, The Green Man (2000). In 1994, exhibiting typical desire for autonomy and self-sufficiency, he set up his own record label, Science Friction, to curate and rerelease his entire back catalogue, along with a clutch of CDs of live and unreleased material covering his entire career. In his book, The Passions Of Great Fortune (2003), he published his complete lyrics together with photos, annotations and re-evaluations of every one of his songs.

With a new series of reissues in 2011, Roy Harper’s incredible, visionary catalogue of work enters the digital domain in time for his music to take on a new, urgent and timely appeal, in an age in which the hypocrisies and injustices he railed against are more present than ever before. It’s been a damned good innings and he’s still not out.

Dave Pegg is an English multi-instrumentalist and record producer, primarily a bass guitarist. He is the longest-serving member of the pre-eminent British folk rock band Fairport Convention and has been bassist with a number of important folk and rock groups including the Ian Campbell Folk Group and Jethro Tull. He has appeared on some of the most significant albums of his era, as well as undertaking solo projects. His style of playing bass has been particularly influential in folk rock music.

Strawbs are an English rock band founded in 1964. Although the band started out as a bluegrass group they eventually moved on to other styles such as folk rock, progressive rock, and glam rock.They are best known for their hit, "Part of the Union", which reached number two in the UK charts in February 1973, as well as for "Lay Down" a popular Progressive Rock hit from the same LP. The Strawbs also toured with Supertramp in their "Crime of the Century" tour, doing their own "Hero and Heroine" tour, which drew musical similarities and themes.

Mellow Candle were a progressive folk rock band. Principally Irish, the members were also unusually young, Clodagh Simonds being only 15 and Alison Bools and Maria White 16, and still at school, at the time of their first single, "Feelin' High", released in 1968 on Simon Napier-Bell's SNB Records.By 1972, the lineup had expanded to include Dave Williams on guitar, Frank Boylan on bass, and William Murray on drums. With this lineup in place, the band released their only album, Swaddling Songs, which was commercially unsuccessful at the time. Over the years, however, the lone album by the band has received considerable critical acclaim and original vinyl copies are now very valuable. Boylan was later replaced by Steve Borrill, but shortly afterwards the band split up.

Trees was a British folk rock band recording and touring throughout 1969, 1970 and 1971, reforming briefly to continue performing throughout 1972. Although the group met with little commercial success in their time, the reputation of the band has grown over the years, and underwent a renaissance in 2007 following Gnarls Barkley's sampling of the track Geordie on the title track of their multi-million selling album St. Elsewhere.

Peter Joseph Andrew Hammill is an English singer-songwriter. He is a founder member of the progressive rock band Van der Graaf Generator. Best known as a singer, he also plays guitar and piano. He also acts as a record producer for his own recordings and occasionally for other artists. In 2012, he was recognised with the Visionary award at the first Progressive Music Awards.

Home were a British rock band, active in the early 1970s.The core line up featured Mick Stubbs on lead guitar and lead vocals, Laurie Wisefield on lead guitar and vocals, Cliff Williams on bass guitar and vocals, and Mick Cook on drums. They also had two keyboardists during their existence. From 1971 to 1972 it was Swansea's Clive John, and the other for the rest of their short career was Jimmy Anderson.

Caravan are an English band from the Canterbury area, founded by former Wilde Flowers members David Sinclair, Richard Sinclair, Pye Hastings and Richard Coughlan in 1968. The band have never achieved the great commercial success that was widely predicted for them at the beginning of their career, but are nevertheless considered a key part of the Canterbury scene, blending psychedelic rock, jazz and classical influences to create a distinctive progressive rock sound.The band were originally based in Whitstable, Kent, near Canterbury, but moved to London when briefly signed to Verve Records. After being dropped by Verve, the band signed to Decca Records, where they released their most critically acclaimed album, In the Land of Grey and Pink in 1971. Dave Sinclair left after the album's release and the group split up the following year. Hastings and Coughlan added new members, notably viola player Geoffrey Richardson, continuing on before splitting in 1978.The band reformed several times in the following decades, and Caravan still remain active as a live band in the 21st century, despite Coughlan's death in December 2013.

The Nice were an English progressive rock band active in the late 1960s. They blended rock, jazz and classical music and were keyboardist Keith Emerson's first commercially successful band.The group was formed in 1967 by Emerson, Lee Jackson, David O'List and Ian Hague to back soul singer P. P. Arnold. After replacing Hague with Brian Davison, the group set out on their own, quickly developing a strong live following. The group's sound was centred on Emerson's Hammond organ showmanship and abuse of the instrument, and their radical rearrangements of classical music themes and Bob Dylan songs.The band achieved commercial success with an instrumental rearrangement of Leonard Bernstein's "America", following which O'List left the group. The remaining members carried on as a trio, releasing several albums, before Emerson decided to split the band in early 1970 in order to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The group briefly reformed in 2002 for a series of concerts.